Series of bad drives on a road to bottom

The long downhill for Tiger Woods began in his own driveway, at what was his home in Windermere, Fla., at the time, in what must feel to him now like another life.

It was about 2:30 in the morning, the day after Thanksgiving night in 2009 when the police and the ambulance showed up, with Woods lying in the street outside his Escalade — the ending to some story about how his wife had somehow broken a window with a golf club to rescue him.

Woods was still the biggest star in American sports at the time, even though it had been 19 months since his 14th and last major, the U.S. Open of 2008, a tournament Woods had managed to win with a broken bone in one of his legs.

He has not won a major since. Instead of the four more majors he needed to tie Jack Nicklaus at 18, he has had four back surgeries instead. Now he is arrested on suspicion of DUI at around 3 in the morning in Jupiter, Fla., on Monday. Now what was the face of golf and the smiling face of American sports for more than a decade after he won the Masters at 21 in 1997 is the face the world saw in the mug shot.

Once again, nothing good happens for Tiger Woods after two in the morning, certainly not in his car.

There have been other times before when we thought Woods had ended the long trip that once began at the top of his driveway. Finally he does, on a road called Military Trail in Jupiter.

Last week on his website, he updated everyone on his latest back surgery, in April, a fusion that he said would keep him away from competition for the rest of this year at least, but said made him painfree. But he affirmed at the time that he planned to someday return to competitive golf.

“I haven’t felt this good in years,” Woods said.

It is not yet announced by the police in Jupiter whether he was under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Woods says that alcohol was not involved, that this is all about prescription drugs. We will find out about that soon enough.

For now, Woods continues to make news for everything except his golf game. This is the young guy who replaced Michael Jordan as the biggest star we had, once Jordan finally retired from pro basketball in 2003; who held that unofficial title for a good long time until LeBron James replaced him. Now Woods makes news with this mug shot, as James is about to take a shot at another NBA title. James is 32. Woods was 32 when he won his last major.

There was a time, when Woods began to dominate golf the way he did and began to make his run at Jack Nicklaus, when I was talking to Jordan about him. Michael was addressing all the talk about Tiger was on his way to being the next Michael, or the next Jack. Jordan smiled and shook his head and said, “He’s the first Tiger.”

No one knew when he won the ’08 Open in a playoff against Rocco Mediate and then went off to recuperate from the surgery to repair his leg, that amazing fall from grace had already begun. After the trip down his driveway in Windermere came the conga line of girlfriends, the news of his infidelities coming in waves. Woods wasn’t the first athlete to cheat on his wife, as if going for a record far different from Nicklaus’. But somehow what Woods had done didn’t just disappoint people. It made them angry. Somehow they decided that someone who had been this kind of winner couldn’t possibly act like this much of a loser.

He went to rehab, for some still-undisclosed reason. Came back. Issued a public apology. There was even the year, just four years ago, when Woods was still a good enough golfer to win five of the 16 tournaments he entered, on his way to being voted golf’s Player of the Year. By then, it was five years since the 14th major. Before long, his body began to betray him, as if his back had turned into Mickey Mantle’s knees.

There would be brief comebacks from the surgeries. But he looked nothing at all like the player he had been, the player so many were sure were on his way to being the greatest of them all. And there were times, despite all the swing changes and the way he kept changing coaches, when the problems looked as much mental as physical.

“He’s become a head case in a mental game,” my friend Barney Adams, who founded Adams Golf, once said to me.

The last tournament of any kind he completed was the Hero World Challenge in the Bahamas, this past December. The last surgery was four months later. Now comes this arrest. There have been other falls for other great athletes, for all sorts of reasons. The one Woods takes with the cops doesn’t make him a drunk or bum or irredeemable, doesn’t mean he can’t come back again if his back ever heals.

This is just the end of the long downhill for Tiger Woods, at least for now. Not the bottom of the driveway this time. Just the bottom of the mountain.